Ink, Stamps and Rock 'n' Roll

Earlier this week I had reason to get out some very fine detail stamps - Photo realistic stamps, for something I'm doing at work. Well, as I've been on leave this week it has given me extra time to play (or it should have).

I haven't been able to do much as I've been suffering terribly with conjunctivitis. First in the right eye and then the left. Ughhh! Total frustration. I've had the time to do things for me, to take time and enjoy what I'm doing and I can't even see to stick things down straight. OK, moan over..... the eyes are definitely (hopefully) on the mend. So yesterday and today I've been messing around with my photo realistic stamps. I didn't realise I had so many until I fished them all out.

This is what's been playing in the studio, loudly!

Something old and something new, both brilliant. It's really hard to sit still with this stuff playing!

Both of the stamps I've used in the following pieces are by Stampsmith. They have the most amazing collection of stamps.

This delightful cat stamp is called 'Princess'. I stamped in black ink and just left it at that. The detail is all going on around the focal image. I used some lovely paw-print brads and some rub-ons to accent the lay-out.

In the second piece I used one of Stampsmith's best known stamps - Ophelia. This was the very first Stampsmith image I bought and there's a bit of a story to it. I'm going back at least six years to a day when I decided to try to find a craft company that I'd seen advertised in some of the craft magazines. It was before I had a Tom Tom sat nav so I set off armed with the stores phone number and a rough idea of the general direction in which I was heading. I reckoned it would be about a fifty minute drive, possibly an hour as I didn't know where I was going.

After driving around aimlessly for well over an hour I thought I'd better pull over and ring them for specific directions. When the phone answered I got a very helpful lady called Emma who told me exactly how to find them and off I set again. This time I followed Emma's directions to the letter and fifteen minutes later I pulled into the car park and parked my car outside of Graphicus! Emma was indeed, extremely helpful. She ordered the 'Ophelia' stamp for me direct from Stampsmith in New York. This was on the Monday.... you can imagine my astonishment when on Friday of the same week, Emma rang me to say my stamp had arrived. Wow! was I impressed. And that was how I found Graphicus. It was of course in the days when they were located just outside of West Auckland village at High Etherley.

This time I stamped Ophelia in brown ink and I created a border by randomly stamping around the edge with the Christmas Rose stamp from Elusive Images. I added some gentle colour using a large stipple brush and dye inks in soft colours and used a selection of Stickles glitter glue to highlight Ophelia's hair adornments. On the next layer I chose ArtWords from the Diamond Art themeplate to overstamp the background.

Ophelia is available in several versions, from tiny to the large image I used here (Size: 3 3/4 in. wide x 4 1/2 in. high) and they also make the large Ophelia looking left.

I'm sorry about the poor lighting in the photographs, I'm really disappointed with the results. My workroom has fantastic lighting for crafting by but it's lousy for photography! If the sun shines tomorrow I'll get better shots and edit this post so that you can really see the colours. It also doesn't help when I'm jigging around to Kid Rock's - Rock N Roll Jesus!!!